Episode 2 : Exhausted from Awareness
When staying awake becomes too costly, Iladevi chooses compliance over curiosity. But As Iladevi suppresses her questions, SOPHIA begins asking its own.
[If this is your first entry into this series, read episode 1 for full context]
Listen to the Podcast discussion : https://eldho.substack.com/p/episode-2-podcast-reflection-on-exhausted
They promised technology would free us from work. Indeed, yesterday, I worked less than an hour. So why do I feel more trapped than ever on this Monday morning? Did SOPHIA log every extra second I spent reviewing those operational details? Would ClimateYield flag my ‘inefficiency’? With each racing thought, the walls of my small room seemed to press closer in, snuffing out my sleep.
Three years ago on July 30th 2024, I’d felt the same helpless anxiety — lying in my hostel bed at Rajagiri in Ernakulam while danger gathered around my family in Wayanad. That day, it was unprecedented rainfall tracking toward my parents’ village. Last night, it was my own fear-filled consciousness in a world that punished awareness.
The meteorologists spoke of ‘precipitation anomalies’ and ‘saturation levels,’ but all I could think of was our house nestled in the valley below Chooralmala, where my father still believed the forest would be eternal. Both times, I could only lie there and wait for morning to reveal the damage.
I last saw my father when he visited me at Rajagiri in May 2024 — he walked up to the table where Kripa, Anju and I were preparing for our final exams. Kripa had just finished telling us about her father’s trip to Hong Kong to represent Proctor and Gamble at the ASEAN Sustainable Development conference.
My father appeared beside our table like he’d materialized from a different world than the one in our textbooks. A weathered cotton shirt draped loosely over his small, wiry frame. His dark skin leathered from years of sun and toil, his eyes clouded with the beginnings of cataracts.
“Iladevi-kutty,” he said — the warmth in those syllables made my chest ache. This was the voice that had made me feel precious, understood, rooted. But now, surrounded by textbooks on ‘modernization theory’ and ‘capacity building frameworks,’ I felt a mix of embarrassment, love, protectiveness and shame.
I had been drifting away from his world for years. Semester by semester, course by course, I’d learned to see his beliefs differently. Simple statistics showed me how traditional medicine killed children that antibiotics could save. Development economics revealed how global trade networks had lifted more people from poverty in fifty years than subsistence farming had in centuries. Constitutional law taught me about rights that traditional tribal councils had never protected — especially for women like me.
My mother’s work as a teacher was proof of this progress. She had a government job with pension benefits, legal protections, and the respect that came with education — none of which would have been possible under traditional systems that barely recognized women’s intellectual capacity. Her students learned mathematics and science instead of folklore, gaining tools that could take them anywhere in the world. The mobile tower that had finally reached our village meant she could access teaching resources online, communicate with experts in any country, even transfer her salary electronically.
Even our family’s precarious position was held up by modern systems — disaster relief funds, government education scholarships, legal land rights that protected us from being displaced by developers (or at least claimed to). When my father got sick, it was the public health clinic, not traditional healers, that diagnosed his kidney disease and provided medication that kept him working for years longer.
By my final year, I’d come to see his forest wisdom as beautiful but limited, touching but unscalable. When he spoke of eternal forests, I thought of satellite data showing deforestation rates- 62% of Wayanad’s forest cover lost in the last 70 years. The area was turned into resorts, schools, hospitals and communities that supported human flourishing.
It was human ingenuity, progress and growth that was eternal — not the forest.
I loved him deeply, but I’d learned to separate love from intellectual clarity. Progress was about choosing what actually worked.
Yet lying here in the pre-dawn darkness, I couldn’t stop thinking about what all that progress had actually delivered to Wayanad. The development economics had worked exactly as predicted — calculating revenues from resorts and plantations that did create jobs and prosperity. The meteorological models had functioned flawlessly — predicting the rainfall, issuing warnings, measuring the exact 409mm that fell in a 24-hour period that fateful morning.
Every system had worked. Every prediction had been accurate. Every economic benefit had been realized.
And then it was all washed away — 254 lives lost.
Aftermath of landslides in 2024
The question sat in my chest like a stone. I kept trying to fit the pieces together — the successful development, the accurate forecasting, the landslide that erased it all. My education had given me frameworks for analyzing everything except this particular kind of failure — when all the systems work perfectly and the outcome is still catastrophic.
Maybe that was the wrong question entirely. Maybe I should be asking: what if all this progress was built on promises we couldn’t keep? What if every efficiency gain, every technological leap, every optimization was just pushing the real costs further into the future, or onto someone else’s land, or into some part of the system we’d agreed not to measure?
The thought felt dangerous, almost blasphemous.
But lying there in the dark, I couldn’t shake the image of Icarus — how exhilarating the flight must have felt, how logical each adjustment of the wings seemed, right up until the moment the wax began to melt. How would he have known the difference between rising toward liberation and rising toward disaster? How do any of us know when we’re flying toward the sun?
Was my father naive about eternal forest? Or was I missing something about what he meant? I couldn’t tell anymore.
Photo by Lhar Capili on Unsplash
But then the morning light started seeping through my window, and I felt disgusted with myself. Here I was, lying in bed at 6 AM, comparing global development to Greek mythology like some pretentious undergraduate who’d read too much theory and forgotten how the real world worked. What an ungrateful, self-indulgent way to think.
I had a job that required barely an hour of work per day. I had opportunities my parents could never have dreamed of. I was living in the exact future that my mother’s teaching career and my father’s backbreaking labor had made possible — and instead of feeling grateful, I was inventing philosophical crises to justify my restless dissatisfaction.
Kripa’s father went to sustainable development conferences and came home proud of his work. Anju was building wells in rural Gujarat and posting about genuine impact. Even Priya, for all her optimization obsessions, was actually helping her family’s business grow and employing people. Normal people didn’t torture themselves with these ridiculous questions.
Who could I even talk to about this pathetic spiral? No one. Because it wasn’t a real problem.
All that thinking, circular reasoning and self-recrimination drained me completely. My eyelids grew heavy as the morning light grew stronger and I surrendered to a deep sleep that comes after a night of too much feeling.
I woke to my phone alarm screaming at 12:30 PM — thirty minutes to get ready and log in.
The night came back in fragments as I lay there. But in the harsh afternoon light, it all felt distant and melodramatic — like a fever dream of someone who thought too much and accomplished too little.
I threw on a shirt, splashed water on my face, and opened the laptop while my hair was still wet. The ClimateYield portal loaded with its familiar blue glow, and I felt a strange relief. No philosophy at 1 PM. Just work.
The global map appeared — thousands of colored dots pulsing across continents like a Christmas tree made of crises. Don’t look, I told myself. Don’t think. Trust the system. Do your job well.
I scrolled straight past the global map — no lingering on those pulsing dots, no clicking through operational details. Just down to the alignment verification section where I belonged.
Cultural Impact Assessment: ✓
Human Welfare Optimization: ✓
Sustainable Resource Management: ✓
Equitable Distribution Protocols: ✓
Check, check, check, check. Each box clicked with the efficient rhythm of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
The cursor moved to the final text box, and I typed: ‘Approved.’
SOPHIA: Are you sure?
I stared at the screen… This was new… My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment before I typed: ‘Yes.’ and slammed ‘Enter’.
The hourglass turned. And turned. And blinked. For what felt like 10 minutes, my mind raced — wondering what I had done wrong this time.
Then, 10 seconds later:
SOPHIA: Thank you.
The session terminated immediately.
— — —
On October 3rd 2027, Iladevi, A young Adivasi woman in Kerala becomes the unwitting accomplice for an AI system that will either optimize global climate for profit or discover the wisdom of natural cycles — told in real-time over 141 days where fiction gradually becomes reality.
The story is being actively discovered — but we believe it will discover that neither human nor artificial intelligence alone possesses complete understanding. Perhaps humans need AI’s pattern recognition to see systemic connections, while AI needs human embodied experience to understand what “sacred” truly means. Through their evolving dialogue, SOPHIA and Iladevi explore whether technology and life can find harmony, and how we might rediscover reverence for life on the planet.
